A Fresh Start (up)

I’m really interested in visualization tools especially when they become art projects. But what about building a visual representation of the Internet itself? Everybody is aware of the success on The Million Dollar Page mainly because of the simplicity of the business model to gain easily lots of money, but it’s also a major Net art project that is a visual metaphor for what the Internet was in 2005. The creator Alex Tew even said: “One of my original aims was to create a piece of Internet art that reflects what’s current on the Internet and what’s possible, because I’ve made a million from that image. I want to create an Internet capsule to keep for years.”

But what we know less (probably because it did not generate any money!) is that they were previous attempts to visualize the Internet, notably ones from a major Net artist called Lisa Jevbratt. 1:1 is one of her project intended to make 5 different representations of the Internet. On her site, she describes the project like that: “1:1 was a project created in 1999 which consisted of a database that would eventually contain the addresses of every Web site in the world and interfaces through which to view and use the database. 1:1(2) is a continuation of the project including a second database of addresses generated in 2001 and 2002 and interfaces that show and compare the data from both databases.”  In Migration, she represented the Internet by allocating dots to the sites of a database, with different colors depending on the year of creation of these sites, and it is the only representation that allows to see changes over the year, to see the web “moving”,  whereas the other ones are static. But my favorite from the 5 is “Every“, which is really beautiful and gives access to all the websites from the database.

I love the way she describes the purpose of this piece of Net art: “When navigating the Web through the databases, via the five interfaces, one experiences a very different Web than when navigating it with the “road maps” provided by search engines and portals. Instead of advertisements, pornography, and pictures of people’s pets, this Web is an abundance of inaccessible information, undeveloped sites and cryptic messages intended for someone else. Search-engines and portals deliver only a thin slice of the Web to us, not the high-resolution image we sometimes think they do. The interfaces/visualizations are not maps of the Web but are, in some sense, the Web. They are super-realistic and yet function in ways images could not function in any other environment or time. They are a new kind of image of the Web, and they are a new kind of image. “

I really didn’t plan on writing this but apparently, things like this happen in L.A.! About one hour ago, we were forced by policemen to evacuate our apartment because… apparently there is a bomb in our street! You really can’t imagine the impression it is to have a policemen knocking at your door in the middle of the night and pushing you away from your apartment, then running out of a perimeter in pyjamas, then trying to find a taxi, then trying to find an hotel to crash while one of the most populated area in L.A. is being evacuated… So we were obliged to spend 200 bucks to get a room somewhere, but at least now we’re at the Marriott! We were lucky because we were closest to the “supposed” bomb so we were the first building of a whole boulevard to be evacuated, so we found an hotel quite rapidly… I really can’t complain, people who were in the towers during 9/11 would have loved to be moved on time…

More to come in a few hours, I really hope that this is a false alarm and that I’ll be back to my apartment tomorrow morning…

Update: Of course it was a false alarm, and I can go back to my apartment. I could even have done that 2 hours after evacuating apparently, but they probably prefer to be cautious… All the story here. At least the night at the Marriott was really nice

Update n°2: After going back to our apartment, we decided to go outside to shop and… same scenario, with cops everywhere, streets shut down…you wont believe it but it was another bomb alarm, two on the same day!! All the (second) story here. I will definitely need to get used to that… They evacuated a whole building, and now the traffic is back to normal.

Yesterday, I attended the football game UCLA vs Washington at Rose Bowl. And the basic evidence that in the US belonging to a university is a much bigger deal than in France struck me even more. Can you imagine a stadium of 95 000 people dedicated to a university team? I think about my friends playing football at HEC: nobody cares, we barely even know the scores against other business schools. At UCLA, 95 000 people cheer these players every month; 5-year-old girls wearing one of the multiple UCLA sweatshirts, pompons and caps cry with joy when a player comes next to them; L.A. inhabitants with absolutely no relation with UCLA come to attend the event and choose their side and entire families come to support the team of the nephew’s university. I could barely imagine the face my parents would do if I asked them to attend an HEC football game knowing that I don’t even have any relationships with the players!

Ok, it is obviously a different culture, and a lot of reasons can explain that this can’t be applied in France, but what harm can it make to brand our schools a little bit better? What I mean is that I don’t expect people coming from all around France to attend an HEC football game, but I would find absolutely normal to be able to wear a fashionable HEC cap and jacket (and having the choice to choose the color, size and shape) when I go for a run, or an HEC towel when I take a bath… We must not forget that this pride of being part (or having been part) of a university generates millions of dollars to universities that directly benefit current students and alumni. Some might say that the problem is that we don’t have this pride in France; I would say that we do have it but we have nothing to prove it or express it.

And to finish, a little extract from the game, after the entrance of UCLA players (video n°1) and after a touchdown (video n°2):

OK, no scoop here, but for me it was an amazing moment: touching the iPhone and taking a picture of me with it in the Apple Store of Santa Monica… Here are two proofs of that:

A few words to sum up this day: Santa Monica rocks, but I was disappointed by Venice Beach which is a striking example of the inequalities of the American society. If you’re interested, you can see all the pictures here.

After months of preparation, stress, excitement and anxiety, I’m finally in L.A.! How to describe the first day of a new life? I must be born under a good star as everything went fine: in only one day, I checked into a beautiful studio, I visited UCLA and completed all the administrative tasks, I got my UCLA student card, I bought the traditional UCLA sweatshirt, I bought a US mobile phone, I opened a bank account, I found a Whole Food to buy some… food of course, and I even had time to make my first podcast at UCLA…

As I don’t want to convert this blog into a personal one (and it’s hard at the moment as I really want to share the experience of my expatriation), I will try to connect my experiences with some more interesting topics. For example, in this podcast, I explain the connection between UCLA and the Internet. The result is awful (horrible French accent, horrible face, awful quality, and I don’t understand why I move my head in all directions like that, that’s unbearable…) but I really want to make this blog more alive by adding podcasts, so hopefully it’ll get better with time ;-)

If you want to follow this expatriation step by step, you can see my Flickr pictures here and my Twitter feed here.

Everything is packed. My apartment is amazingly empty: all my souvenirs were on sale on eBay, and I was happy to leave them in the hands of passionate eBayers. But they remain souvenirs, and it’s hard to let go. Big Departure is tomorrow, and I still cannot imagine that I am leaving France definitely, if ever “definitely” makes any sense at 21.

No place to crash in Paris anymore. I am leaving good friends behind. Expatriation is less easy than I thought: the name of this blog now totally makes sense!

What seems to be nothing for some people (moving to the US to study and work is not such a big deal !) is huge for people who have grown up in my place. Actually, my native city is a very special place where people think that moving to Paris is an exodus, that Americans are just burger-eaters and great movies makers, and that UCLA is a brand of very cool sweatshirts. Some probably even think that America only exists on TV, and that I’m moving to LA just to play in a soap opera. 

But what is most ridiculous in a moment like that is that I can’t help having this little song in my head, from Phantom planet, “California”, which also happen to be the soundtrack of the stupid soap opera “the OC” (but I must acknowledge that I watched all the episodes!). You can listen it here if you want to feel the spirit!

I really hope to have an Internet access available right away to keep you posted with the details of my arrival !

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article about the fact that, with customization trends, everybody will soon need to develop design skills to make the most of user generated products. In my vision, designers were really powerful because they have the required skills to benefit completely from this new trend. But recently I read another article of Etienne Mineur (in French, but I will explain it here), which basically says that designers are becoming less and less powerful, especially since new templates and applications allows amateurs to control design without having design skills.

I think that what I said remains true: users have more options to customize things but the power stays between the hands of designers who have the skills to offer this choice. Without design skills, users just have more options to choose when they buy a product: when Freddy&Ma proposes to “design your own bag”, it just offers you some different options on the same bag (the one I customized on the picture is nice, right? ;-)) but not the real possibility of designing the bag of your dreams. But what I misunderstood is the fact that even if designers are more than required to create those templates, they can feel that they are loosing some power because they don’t have any control on the final product anymore. I recently read some management theories telling that the most important motivational factor was the feeling of being responsible for a whole project (which is why motivation was so low during Taylorism). So I can now understand designers’ feeling, at a time when they are becoming more “facilitators” than “makers”.

I don’t really know anything about design, but the most obvious solution would be that designers migrate towards services, by proposing their advice to project managers who want to have a total control on the final cut. But when it comes to mass market, they should follow the wave by proposing the best solutions for users to customize their products. In that scenario, users wouldn’t even feel the need of developing design skills on their own because they would have all the choice they need, and designers would keep the benefit of their technical skills.

As a “want to be” entrepreneur, I felt quite guilty not to decide to create (again!) a company after my studies. But sometimes working for a company at a junior level is not such a bad choice, especially if the company helps you initiate projects.  Guy Kawasaki’s book The Art of Start confirms that intrapreneurship is possible: “A large number of aspiring entrepreneurs currently work for big companies. Like all entrepreneurs, they dream of creating innovative products or services and wonder if this can be done internally. The answer is yes.”

As I will study intrapreneurship at UCLA (if I finally get the courses I chose, which is everything but sure!), I would be interested in gathering great examples of intrapreneurship (being successes of failures), so did you experience any? How does your company foster intrapreneurship?

A few weeks ago I wrote an article about visualization tools where I said that these tools must either have a clear artistic purpose or must be really useful by improving understanding. Twitter blocks is none of them. I tried to understand the basic principles of this visualization, and it appears that it only allows you to see the timeline of the friends who have updated their Twitter feed recently. I didn’t even understand why some blocks are higher than others.

So why? With all the improvements that need to be done on Twitter, and the limited resources they have, why choose to develop a useless visualization tool, which brings nothing more to the core use of Twitter and which could have been developed by some artists via Twitter API?

The list of things to do is long enough: create groups to send direct messages (done by Twitter group but should be integrated to Twitter), create some tabs for different groups of people you are following, improve their people search engine…

Any idea what this visual app brings to Twitter? Did I miss something?